Traditionalism and Revelation

Abstract

Abstract Traditionalism is the doctrine that God revealed himself to our first parents, and this revelation is the source of our knowledge of God: ‘the knowledge’, as London cabbies still call it, was passed on from its original recipients down the generations. Our knowledge of God is thus mediated through tradition; its only direct source is a divine revelation made to our original forebears. Traditionalism thus tends to accentuate that we cannot know God through our own efforts, for instance by philosophical proofs. Transmission from a single original source explains the analogies between religions and mythologies, while the ‘telephone game’, or ‘Chinese whispers’, over the millennia explains the diversities. Invented in the nineteenth century, traditionalism was at once a contribution to theory of religions, a piece of biblical anthropology, and a theory of revelation and its development. Traditionalists have held that without an original, igniting act of divine revelation to our first ancestors, it would be impossible for the human race to become a knowing, speaking creature, to create institutions, and act morally, or to obtain knowledge of God.